Category: Politics and society

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Goodness knows why!

Families not claiming thousands in childcare rebate:

“Child Care Minister Kate Ellis says parents often do not know they are eligible for the rebate.”

Or, perhaps they know, and thought they’d applied, and just haven’t gotten around to chasing up yet another damn thing…

Or! I have some suggestions about what might have happened!

Perhaps they went to Centrelink’s site on the childcare rebate and found instructions to apply. Oh wait, no they didn’t. They found information about eligibility and payment rates, but not instructions. It almost sounds like it might happen automatically…

But just in case they went to their online Centrelink account, and it said that their identity has not been sufficiently verified to apply for childcare rebate. And they recall what their current level of identitiy verification involved. Consider this interaction (where “Mary” is a randomly chosen name for a Centrelink childcare benefit* recipient, of course):

Customer service officer: “How many shares do you own in $company?”
Mary: “The correct answer is zero. But I am guessing you want the answer I last gave you in 2001.”
CSO: “Yes, the one in 2001.”
Mary: “Well, I don’t know, because I have not kept records of how many shares I owned in $company in 2001.”
CSO: “OK, I see the problem! That was quite a while ago. All right. If you can just tell me how much rent you pay…”
Mart: “The correct answer is zero. But I am guessing you want the answer I gave you in 2003?”
CSO: “Yes please. If you can!”

That is, I received Youth Allowance as a student from Centrelink, and their entire identification procedure assumes that either I kept details records of my exact financial state at the time, or that it hasn’t changed. (Rents haven’t gone up in eight years, surely?) So, the system is designed to not give a benefit to anyone who ever received a benefit in the past, because interacting with them is just such a pain the second time. Which is not a surprise, since they administer unemployment benefits.

Not that new customers have it easy. A story I heard was someone’s genuine physical address tripping up a rather poorly written “no post office boxes” validator, and who therefore couldn’t meet the requirement of providing a residential address.

* Childcare benefit is not the same as childcare rebate. DUH. And there’s no way that’s confusing people into believing they have received all their entitlements.

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Quick hit: NSW Coalition drops active anti-ethics classes policy

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Coalition folds in ethics class battle:

THE state opposition has dumped its promise to remove ethics classes from NSW public schools if it is elected, as 57 schools prepare to start teaching the new course within weeks…

In November the opposition education spokesman, Adrian Piccoli, said a Coalition government would remove the classes being offered in schools as an alternative to special religious education, or scripture classes… ”We voted against the legislation, so once the legislation passed through the Parliament there was a recognition that ethics classes are going to be in place,” he said. ”The view was it has been legislated and we are going to allow them to continue. The battle over ethics classes is finished and we will be part of it.”

Note to commenters: Hoyden has had fairly long discussions of the ethics classes before, see related posts below. Many commenters here (of course, not all) would probably ultimately rather see SRE abolished entirely and religious education designed for adherents or potential converts conducted privately out of school hours, and ethics and non-adherent religious studies treated as a regular part of the curriculum (as they already are to some extent).

Lauredhel had some interest comments on my last thread:

If anyone reading knows a child attending the ethics classes starting this term, it would be interesting to hear their experiences. (Privacy concerns permitting of course.)

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Idea for the taking: Freedom Fest

Note: this isn’t commentary on linux.conf.au 2011 in particular, I’ve been thinking about this vaguely for a couple of years and it’s time to release the ideas into the wild where someone might actually do something about it. Also, it should in no way be read as a commitment to me actually ever doing this. Steal this idea.

Consider the linux.conf.au miniconf system, in which there are single-day community organised streams occupying the first two days of the conference. Now… consider that as its own conference. That is, I envisage an Australian open source conference that has the organisers take care of the boring chores centrally: insurance, registration, venues. Then the space is provided to representatives of various communities to run their own stream. Because I am a control freak, I would probably also do the following centrally:

  1. provide a common timetable for all rooms, to allow attendees to move around between talks
  2. provide conference volunteers to act as session chairs, in order to make sure the talks actually end on time
  3. check people’s program, and take away slots if they are filled with things like “TBA” and “Lightning Talks TBA”. Shorter streams than a full day should be possible.

(And yes, needless to say, I would want some kind of central management of conduct/harassment policies too. Which would be hard if the policy is to apply to talks that aren’t centrally selected. But then, LCA has this problem with miniconfs already.)

It would also be important to be more flexible on registration than linux.conf.au is (almost always, there were small exceptions in 2008), that is, to allow people to attend for a single day without paying for the whole event. Generous provision of hack or unconference space would be necessary!

This would mainly advantage communities that don’t overlap really well with LCA. Typically if they try and hold a miniconf they struggle both to get core members to attend (because they have no interest in Linux or in the main program) and to get LCA attendees along. One day registrations and the brand distinction would help a lot. It would also perhaps bring smaller communities together for the first time. The main disadvantage would be adding another major conference to the calendar, potentially competing directly with LCA if events like Haecksen moved to it. (People who use annual leave to go to conferences will likely only go to one long one.) If it actually replaced the first couple of days of LCA, perhaps not so much.

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"Just leave if you don't like it"

A note on the arguments following Mark Pesce’s keynote. There’s one in particular that bugs me: “just leave if you don’t like it.”

The thing is, it isn’t normal at linux.conf.au (unlike at a Bar Camp) to just exit a talk from, say, the front section in the middle of a row. Unless you are at the very edge of the room, it’s considered rude to just leave, to the point where some speakers or session chairs might actually yell at you. (I had university lecturers do that.) And I suspect LCA, for organisational reasons as well as for speaker comfort, would rather not encourage an atmosphere of people just traipsing in and out of talks through the centre of rooms. So… the environment is (somewhat) coercive: if you don’t like the talk, you have to be actively rude to the speaker and the rest of the audience in protecting yourself from the talk.

If an environment could be created where someone could leave a talk from any place in the audience with a minimum of fuss and without risk of social retribution, and if people really did do so for all kinds of reasons, and thus an exit during Pesce’s talk would not have been immediately visible to everyone as “I have a strangulation phobia, if you would like to bother me in future, please mime strangling me”[1], I’d at least take this argument seriously. But in the LCA context it currently equates to: “don’t like the talk? embarrass yourself and be rude to the speaker!”

(Note to LCA people: I have a comment policy, and if your comment annoys me I won’t publish it.)

[1] I do have a strong reaction to strangulation, although probably not technically phobic, and if anyone uses this information to harass me even as a joke[2], they will not be my friend thereafter.

[2] People who have physical triggers, like having sharp objects pointed at their eyes, or disliking their neck being touched without warning, and who admit them, do suddenly find that half their acquaintance immediately does that to find out what happens. Consider yourself warned about what will happen.

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linux.conf.au 2011: dinner activities

linux.conf.au has a charity auction over dinner. There are various failure modes:

  1. it’s a year of big corporate budgets, so bidding reaches about $5000, no one else can compete, and then it stops
  2. it’s not a year of big corporate budgets, so bidding reaches about $500 from a private individual and then it stops
  3. bids aren’t high enough, so there is some pressure for someone to donate something precious. This was how Bdale Garbee ended up being shaved by Linus Torvalds at linux.conf.au 2009. This can be fun, but it also at least tweaks and sometimes outright triggers people’s fear of coercion (having a lot of drunk people screaming for your beard is definitely coercive).

There’s always been a tradition of large consortia of private individuals forming to try and solve problem #1, in recent years these have even tended to win. The trouble then is what happens to the money that was pledged by losers: at lca2011 (and I think lca2010 too, but I wasn’t there) bids aren’t revocable. The donated money stays donated, the only question is whether you get a prize associated with it.

So far so good for money. And now for entertainment, as Rusty posts. The trouble with lca2011 was that the auction consisted of people walking up to laptops and having their donation amount entered and associated with their team. Running totals were displayed on a graph, but spectacle was lacking.

The ritual humiliation of Linux celebrities does have something in it. But, no more screaming for people’s beards. I think it would be much more appropriate, and probably fun, to organise something in advance to occur at the dinner, with celebrities volunteering. The closest model would be lca2004’s dunking of Linus Torvalds (which was organised in advance, the pressure placed on Torvalds to participate I can’t speak to but he gives the appearance of generally enjoying some mild organised humiliation for the benefit of charity).

Say, as an example, that five developers compete to throw three-pointers (actually, this is probably too hard, in addition to being difficult to stage at a dinner, but never mind). Then there’s a very short pre-planned set of auctions for things like being able to take steps forward to start with, extra shots, probably culminating in the right to substitute, together with a simple “highest amount, yay!” kind of contest. At least one or two bids to allow your celebrity to increase the challenge facing an opponent. Probably five rounds of shots total with bidding in between. You could probably solve some obvious problems (like everyone backing Torvalds or betting against him or whatever) with simple transparent manipulation: Linux Australia increasing their matching donations when tables back their assigned celebrity, or something.

Finally, since this is a developer conference, there should be some kind of application allowing people to pledge using their phones from their tables.

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linux.conf.au 2011: lightning talk take homes

As usual some rather important things went on in the lightning talks.

Rusty Russell got irritated at Geoff Huston’s “IPocalypse” keynote (which argued that the last minute no-options-left switch to IPv6 runs the risk of IPv6 being outcompeted by a closed solution) and he got coding. The result is a CCAN module (so, C code) to support simultaneous IPv4 and IPv6 connections, thus not penalising either. He’ll fix the dependency’s licence shortly. It might not work perfectly yet.

Donna Benjamin is trying to raise $7500 to get The National Library of Australia to digitise The Dawn, Louisa Lawson’s journal for women from the nineteenth century.

In intellectual property news (specifically, anti-stronger IP news) Kim Weatherall wants us to worry about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which Australia will likely ratify, the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement, which it would be really great to oppose, the impending result of the Federal Court appeal in the iiNet case, which iiNet may lose, and even if they don’t there will probably be legislative “three strikes” discussion about copyright violation.

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linux.conf.au 2011: Day 1

Slow first day for me. I had a stressful Sunday getting a toddler to the airport on my own and Andrew has just flown in from the US.

We weren’t very impressed with our hotel, iStay River City. For starters, it has extremely limited keys. Many, but not all, rooms have two keys, which would be hard enough with four adults per room, but one of the keys for our room is missing, which means one key (and suggests that somewhere out there a former guest still has a working key to our room). The hotel reception wasn’t even sympathetic. People steal our keys all the time! What else are we to do?!

There’s no way to leave a key with reception and get yourself back into the room unless you have a second key to the room. There are buzzers for the rooms, but the reception smilingly conceded that it does only get guests into the lobby. You have to go down the lift yourself to get them up to the room. (Interestingly, this has meant with a lot of confusion from other LCA attendees. “How hard is it to make a new keycard?” Bad assumption. They are using keys, as in, those chunks of metal with notches in them.)

There’s also several things broken in our apartment: a couple of lights, the phone, the bathroom fan.

Anyway, after a restless night, LCA! I mostly spent time at the Haecksen miniconf, although partly working on my laptop in an introversion bubble. I wasn’t really ready, after the travel and the settling in, to sit down and listen to talks well. Some talks I did catch in whole or in part:

  • Pia Waugh Applying martial arts to the workplace: your guide to kicking arse
  • Brianna Laugher An Approach to Automatic Text Generation
  • Andrew Gerrand Practical Go Programming
  • Noirin Shirley Open Source: Saving the World
  • Donna Benjamin We are here. We have always been here
  • Valerie Aurora and Donna Benjamin Training Allies (workshop)

I didn’t really fully follow any of them, except for Training Allies, which is of professional interest to me now. (More on that later, I guess.)

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LCA2011: unofficial planet

In lieu of an official Planet site for LCA2011, I’ve set up an unofficial one. http://lcaplanet.puzzling.org/

Q. I want to be on it!

If you would like to add your own blog to the site, please see http://conf.linux.org.au/wiki/Planet for info and contact me in comments if it doesn’t work out.

Q. What happens when there is an official planet?

I’ll add 301 redirects as appropriate as soon as an official planet is announced.

Q. Wait, can this BE the official planet?

LCA organisers, I’m happy to be the official Planet if it makes things easier for you. Get in touch with me.

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Linux Australia Council statement

I’ve accepted a nomination to stand for Ordinary Council Member of Linux Australia in 2011, and here’s my statement. If you have any questions and so on, please let me know! Ideally ask them on the linux-aus list but here is OK too.

Voting is at https://www.linux.org.au/membership/ until Jan 26th. You can sign up for free membership there at any time. I actually don’t want people to sign up for the sole purpose of electing me, but if you’re an Open Source developer or community member in Australia the organisation is designed for you.

I am keen to help Linux Australia with community and events in 2011 as an OCM. I am especially interested in events, especially liaison and helping Open Source events in Australia, which are increasingly affiliated with LA, share knowledge and resources. I’m also interested in being part of discussions about Linux Australia, Open Source in Australia and young people: entry level community involvement and entry level career outreach for the next generation of Open Source hackers.

Selected previous Open Source community involvement:

linux.conf.au:

  • chair or co-chair of paper selection committee 2008–2010
  • member of paper selection committee 2007–

LinuxChix/Haecksen miniconf:

  • (co-)lead organiser, 2007–2008
  • founder, 2007

AussieChix (Australian chapter of LinuxChix):

  • microconf co-organiser, 2008
  • systems administration, event organisation, website maintainence, 2007–
  • founder, 2007

Wikitravel:

  • administrator, 2005–
  • active contributor, 2004–2006

Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG):

  • Secretary, 2003
  • Ordinary Committee Member, 2002
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LCA2011: preliminary picks

One week to go and the conference is definitely going ahead.

Here’s my early plans for spending my time at LCA. I should note that my husband and our one year old son will be in Brisbane, and for various reasons I won’t be doing a lot of socialising at night. Anyone for lunch?

Monday

I’ll mostly be at the Haecksen miniconf, but also potentially interested in:

(PS, Brianna, how many talks is it physically possible for you to give on a single day?)

I will not be at the Girl Geek Dinner, sadly, but this is only one night after Andrew will have flown in from Dallas and so I’d like to see my family early in the week.

Tuesday

At present I think this will mostly be hallway track.

Wednesday

I will also attend the Linux Australia AGM, since I am standing for election (and I think results are available by then, it seems that voting closes at 26/01/2011 00:00, which is maybe an unfortunate choice of time, since many people will read “votes close 26/01/2011” as giving them that day to vote too).

I won’t be at the Professional Delegates Networking Session, since I am registered as a Hobbyist. I might be at the informal UnProfessional Delegates Session if there is one, and if my husband and son can come.

Thursday

I will be at the Penguin dinner.

Friday

We fly home lunchtime Saturday, so won’t be around for Open Day.